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Saturday, 16 August 2014

Colours I See With

March 15, 1965. Monday. Medical
examination at school. Found I was colour blind. Have to go for a test. Also
have to have my lugs syringed out.

May
28, 1965. Had my right lug washed out and found I have red/green colour
blindness.

I was only
three or four, drawing with my crayons at my grandma's house, when I
first knew I definitely had a problem. I had drawn a house and some trees, and
had just about finished colouring in the grass when Uncle Terence pointed at
it.

“What’s that bit?”

“That’s the grass.”

“Why have you made it brown?” I
took it to mean I was stupid and started to cry.

“Hold on,” he tried to reassure me. “It’s
not too bad. We can make it right.”

He shaded over the brown with a green
crayon, pressing heavily. “There, it looks all right now.” But it didn’t.

It was not the first time I had got green
and brown mixed up. I’d confused them before. To me they looked nearly the
same. I had tried not to let on but people kept catching me out. When it came to colours I felt useless.

Later, at school, about seven years old, we
were all making a fairground collage to put on the classroom wall. Some other
children were busy painting a background of green grass and blue sky on a long
piece of paper, while the rest of us were drawing and painting small characters
and other objects to paste on to it. I had drawn a little man and, so as not to
slice off his arms and legs, had cut around him in smooth curves, giving him his
own coloured background to match the collage. Except it didn’t match. Not only
that, when I stuck him into place, he looked about half the size he should have
been.

“Why is 'e stuck in a pile of 'oss muck?” That came from Harvey Gelder whose dad worked on a farm.

“It spoils it,” muttered Wendy Godley,
and expertly detached my contribution from the collage, screwed it up, and threw it into the waste paper basket.
Everyone seemed in agreement with her. That really wounded me because Wendy Godley was the one person I most wanted to sit next to. She had blonde hair, lots of freckles, an intelligent gaze and could do everything perfectly.

There was little wonder I publicly avoided
all situations involving paint, crayons and colours. But there was no escaping the attention of the school nurse, a terrifying woman aptly named Nurse Pratt.
After asking me spot the numbers hidden in circles of multicoloured blobs,
which I learnt some years later were called Ishihara colour circles, she unfeelingly
announced her diagnosis. “You are colour blind,” and put me on a
list for further tests at the Bartholomew clinic.

The clinic, in Bartholomew Avenue, was a
dreadful place, a square, flat-roofed, single story, unimaginatively designed building in functional Victorian redbrick. It had echoing bare floor and walls, tubular steel and canvas chairs, and a
pervasive smell of medical disinfectant undiminished by the relentless flow of freezing
fresh air from the always-open doors and windows. Through the years, we had been
sent there with fluttering stomachs to queue for injections: polio and
diphtheria at junior school, and later the awful BCG tuberculosis jab. It
was where the school optician had put stinging atropine drops into my eyes and
told my mother I was long sighted and had astigmatism, at which Nurse Pratt had loudly broadcast “You will have to start wearing glasses, and you will have to wear them all the time,” and
the other mothers had laughed when I timidly said, “What, even in bed?” It was
where Nurse Pratt tested your hearing by going to the other side of the room
and whispering “Five five nine”, “Nine five five”, “Five nine five”, what a
finely-tuned test that must have been, and then held your testicles and asked
you to cough (apparently a hernia test). And it was where, one morning, after a week of squirting slimy
oil into my ears, I had them whooshed out with a large syringe of warm water,
and then found myself trying to sort pieces of coloured wool into matching
pairs, and failing miserably. The shame of it!

Colour blindness is an inherited condition
that bears a passing resemblance to a family version of the football pools. If
you, your parents, and their parents, all have Xs in the right rows and
columns, you get a first dividend. The main difference is that you don’t choose
your Xs yourself.

The Xs are X-chromosomes. Women have two of
them, one from each parent, and men only one, from their mother. Colour
blindness is described as X-linked recessive, meaning that it only manifests
itself in the absence of a more dominant unaffected X-chromosome. Because men have only
one X-chromosome, then if they get a colour blind one from their mother, they
will spend the rest of their lives mistaking grey cars for green, and colouring
grass brown. That, at least, is the most common version. There are rarer types
in which you can’t tell blue from yellow, or can’t even see colour at all. Actually,
this traditional understanding has recently had to be revised in light of
findings from the human genome project, which suggests that many different
chromosomes, not just the X ones, are capable of causing deficient colour
vision to some degree.

I got the colour blind X, as did my brother.
We could talk car colours to the bafflement of everyone else. “I really like your
green Polo,” except the log book said it was grey. “We'll be in a silver Metro,” except it was
metallic green. But we both knew what we meant. Uncle Terence was colour blind too, but had learned ways to cope: how
else could he have known I had coloured the grass brown, and try to be so helpful about
it? Eventually, I developed coping strategies too. Although I would never have been allowed to become
an electrician, I built my own stereophonic record player from a kit, which
involved identifying the values of a hundred or so colour-coded resistors. It
worked fine. I am all right with traffic lights too, but just in case of
problems, red is at the top.

There are some advantages as well. It’s a good
excuse for being slow at the pick-your-own fruit farm. Your wife thinks you
can’t see the raspberries properly, but in reality your slowness results from a
combination of ineptitude and gluttony. Also, some colour blind people can
easily spot differences between colour shades indistinguishable to those unaffected - it is said they could easily see through camouflage during the war. Others find you interesting. And you can always play at political
correctness.

“What colour does that look to you?”

“I don’t know, what does it look like to
you?”

“It must be awful being colour blind.”

“That’s not very nice. I’m not blind.”

“Oh! Sorry … to have a ‘colour deficiency’.
”

“It’s just that my colour vision is
not the same as yours.”

Once someone asked me “Tasker, what colours
is it that you see with?”

That’s the best way of putting it I’ve come
across. I just see with different colours to you.

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About Me

I grew up in Yorkshire and worked in Leeds before going to university late. I then lived in various places around the U.K. before moving back to Yorkshire where I now live with my wife and family. This memoir is based on people, places, things and events I knew, with some names and details altered to avoid difficulties. I hope to post once or twice each month.